Autumn vibes mailbag

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Autumn vibes mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

17 - 21 minutes

Hey folks, just a little programming note. It’s been fun doing these mailbag columns, so much fun that Milan asked if he could try his hand at one. So next Friday, I’m gonna take a week off and he’s going to do the answering. Start thinking of some material for him over the weekend!

For now, though, you’re stuck with me.

Marie Kennedy: Do you use the gender of the question-asker (or judgment thereof based on handle and context clues) as a factor in choosing which questions to answer or what order to publish them in? Despite being outnumbered 10:1 in the comments section, seems like lady-questions get the number one slot half the time, and make up about half of the first 6 questions or so.

Yes.

[Editor’s note: When we solicited feedback from women who read the newsletter, one of the most common remarks was that it would be nice to see more visibility from other women in the comments section and in the mailbag. While we like to think that all of our posts are worth reading from start to finish, we know in practice that doesn’t always happen, so we have both been more mindful in our question selection and also tried to put questions from women closer to the top where they’re more likely to be read. We also, of course, realize that guessing someone’s gender based on their handle is an imperfect method, but that’s the information we have available to us.]

JM: One underdiscussed aspect of affirmative action is the preference given to males, particularly at liberal arts schools where - if this preference didn’t exist - women would outnumber men 60:40 (or more). What do you make of both the phenomenon itself - Richard Reeves has a new book out on this - and its lack of overlap with the general affirmative action debate?

I think this is a good illustration of the reality that admissions practices are made by schools for their own benefit and not in pursuit of some larger social goal. To the extent that schools put a thumb on the scales — whether in the form of admissions or who gets offered sweetheart merit scholarships — to boost male enrollment, they are not doing that to correct structural bias against men.

They are doing it because they want students to have a fun time in school. The more fun your students have, the more likely alumni are to donate. The more fun your students have, the more new applicants you’ll get, which lets you be more selective. It’s not super high-minded for a college president to come out and say “one of the ingredients to a successful college is an enjoyable dating scene, so we skew admissions to help our students find boyfriends.” But that’s what’s going on.

But if you zoom out to a society-wide level, we clearly do have a structural imbalance where women are now significantly more likely than men to get college degrees, and also women don’t like to date or marry men who are less educated than they are. That doesn’t sound to me like a recipe for everyone to have a happy, fulfilling life, but it’s also not super clear what you might do about it.

What’s important, I think, is to remember the core insight — schools make admissions policies for self-interested reasons, not for social justice reasons — and to apply that to racial affirmative action. There’s no evidence that diversity admissions policies are increasing the total number of Black and Hispanic college graduates, because of course most schools aren’t selective at all. And while Harvard bolsters its own social legitimacy by recruiting an appropriately diverse class, that simply creates a new diversity problem for the marginally less selective schools that Harvard’s diverse admitted students (which, to be clear, includes plenty of people like me rather than genuine hard luck cases) would otherwise attend. The main benefit of affirmative action to the students is that they get to attend schools with more financial resources. But this is a policy choice. Since California ended affirmative action, the state has somewhat reformed its higher ed funding system to be less tilted in favor of the UC schools and more favorable to Cal State and community colleges. That seems correct and appropriate to me. But it’s indispensably bad for the University of California, which took a hit to its social and political legitimacy that has now disadvantaged it in battles with Cal State.

If (realistically, when) the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action admissions, that will be a real blow to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and a handful of other top-tier universities. But the consequences for society depend largely on which institutions people choose to support financially — and I think moving money down the prestige hierarchy would be a great idea.

Lost Future: How do you feel philosophically about judicial review being part of a country's political system? I remember when I learned in school that a majority of developed countries actually don't have true judicial review, they practice 'parliamentary sovereignty' and the legislature can just pass whatever they want.... Was pretty shocking. But, most of those countries are in the EU, so aren't they now all subject to the EU Court of Human Rights? So maybe that's no longer true, I dunno.

If you were creating a new constitutional order from scratch, would you empower a supreme judiciary to strike down 'unconstitutional' laws? Or is that too subjective & inherently partisan? I think we've all heard criticisms that the justices are just unelected politicians, etc. etc. One reasonable compromise (for the US) that I was thinking is that it should require a supermajority to declare a law unconstitutional- using a raw majority to determine what should be a fundamental question is pretty dumb. Also, individual judges should have a lot less power in our system. Open to hearing your thoughts though!

It’s important to distinguish between two separate ideas. One is judicial review of laws to assess their conformity with the constitution. The other is the idea that the courts should be the people who “go last” in an interbranch conflict.

I think the Canadian system — in which laws are absolutely reviewed by the judiciary for conformity with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but Parliament has the right to overrule the Supreme Court — is good. Overrides do happen under this system, but relatively rarely — the Court’s rulings are not a dead letter. One reason they are not a dead letter is that the Court has a decent amount of legitimacy. But one reason they preserve that legitimacy is the Supreme Court is not a locus of massive partisan conflict. And that’s because strong policy-demanders at odds with an important constitutional ruling have a more promising course of action than politicizing the judiciary — they can just push for parliamentary override. To me, it’s a good system.

But note that in the United States, a lot of the de facto power of the judiciary comes from non-constitutional cases. Because of bicameralism, presidentialism, and the filibuster, the stakes in judicial interpretation of statutes are very high here. If the Supreme Court of Canada rules that some Canadian air pollution regulation violates the law and Parliament feels they don’t like the outcome, they can just pass a new law that clarifies the point. In America, if the Supreme Court rules that the EPA can’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions, then that is a de facto guarantee that there will be no emissions regulation because the barrier to passing a new law is so high in our country.

This is why on some level, I think “judicial review” is the wrong thing to ask questions about. Obviously courts need to be able to do statutory interpretation. But what we have in the United States is an extremely low-productivity legislature that in practice devolves massive amounts of power to the courts.

James L: What do you think about the provision of tanks, advanced anti-aircraft systems (e.g., SAMs), fighter aircraft, and substantially more artillery to Ukraine? Should Europe or the US be ramping up its deliveries? Also, what financial help should Europe and the US be providing to Ukraine?

I think the ideal would be for Ukraine to disavow reconquering Crimea as a war aim (while retaining it as a legitimate military target as long as the war is ongoing) in exchange for a further qualitative step-up in western military assistance. I think Ukraine taking that step would reduce some of the tail risks we are facing, and I think doing it as part of a quid pro quo that secures the delivery of a bunch of useful military equipment makes it politically easier for Ukrainian leaders.

They can say, “look, we don’t accept the legitimacy of what Russia did, but we do acknowledge the authentic pro-Russian sentiments of the population there.” Trying to force them back into Ukraine would only weaken the country, while taking this deal made us stronger.

Michael Tolhurst: Nuclear war is bad and our leaders should discourage it. But I'm unsure what the optimal signaling strategy is here. Obviously Putin who had a weak conventional hand wants to increase the salience of Russia's nuclear arsenal. To avoid nuclear outcomes should the west be more or less bellicose about nuclear weapons than it is now? (Or are we at a reasonable level in our signaling?) Also, while we should certainly deter very strongly nuclear use against NATO, presumably the US probably should not go as far for a country not in NATO. (But then it seems a weird twisting of *their own rules* for Russia to use nukes to preserve recent hostile conquests.)

This is a tricky one as a matter of public communication because a president or secretary of state needs to choose their words very carefully in a way that sometimes makes it hard to be both forceful and clear.

But if Vladimir Putin wants to know what I think (hi, Vlad!), then I would make a few points. One is that I’ve consistently shown better judgment about this Ukraine issue than he has, so he should consider deferring to me. The other is that even his “successful” gambit of seizing Crimea back in 2014 arguably backfired by causing the exit of a lot of pro-Russian voters from the Ukrainian electorate and creating the durable anti-Russian Ukrainian political consensus he fears.

As far as anyone can tell, there is very little battlefield upside to using tactical nuclear weapons. Russia could, of course, use large-scale nuclear weapons to slaughter Ukrainian civilians and destroy their cities. But it’s not possible to turn Ukraine into a radioactive wasteland without creating significant negative consequences for Ukraine’s neighbors. There is inevitably going to be a response. And in exchange you get… what? To conquer rubble? As at best a pariah? Sue for peace!

Bryan T. Mathew: How do you think about national conservatism and post-liberalism? What do you think explains the dissatisfaction from the right with liberal democracy?

My hot take on this is that transatlantic cross-pollination of ideas has been very harmful in this respect.

If you look at Europe, it is actually true that they are midway through an elite-driven process whose goal of “ever closer union” involves essentially the dissolution of sovereign nation-states as that’s been traditionally understood. This is a visionary idea that, whether you find it inspiring or deplorable, is absolutely real. There is an EU flag flying on public buildings, an EU central bank determining macroeconomic conditions, EU regulators setting the agenda across many markets, and plenty of proposals for deeper integration. It would be totally insane to imagine this could unfold without any pushback or contestation.

But then I think American rightists misappropriate the depth of feeling of European political conflicts and deploy it in the United States. To say you disagree with the relevant provisions of the 1980 Refugee Act or think they are outdated under present circumstance and ought to be changed is fine. To declare that Joe Biden is doing “open borders” and our country is at risk of lapsing into non-existence is hysteria. Republicans haven’t even taken the minimal step of writing down a legislative proposal that could be the basis of either bipartisan negotiations today or partisan governance in 2025.

And I think a lot of mischief follows from this confusion on both sides. If you’re an American progressive who remembers people marching against the WTO, you should muster some sympathy for European nationalists who worry about excessive delegation to opaque supranational bodies. But if you’re an American conservative, you should pay attention when Joe Biden says proudly that “America is an idea” and delivers his big anti-MAGA speech from Liberty Hall. We have significant political disagreements in the United States but also a very firm national identity and a sovereign state.

Luke Christofferson: I'm looking for a recommendation for a right leaning, print journal or newspaper to subscribe my father to. For most of my memory he was an intense, but mostly normal conservative. Recently, he has gotten more Trumpy and angry at politics, which I mostly attribute to Fox News' (which he watches about 2 hours/day) Trumpy turn. I want to provide him with some sort of alternate news source to hopefully prevent some of the radicalization I've seen in his friends (some light QAnon stuff going on), but like all conservatives, he heavily distrusts “mainstream media.” All of my news consumption is electronic, so I don't have a good sense of a physical journal that is right enough to have some conservative cred but also isn't going to literally call for Civil War if Trump is indicted. Got anything for me?

Some context: His identity is 100% rooted in his Evangelical Christianity. Relatedly, he thinks that Christians are the most discriminated against group in America and originally became politically invested as he felt the secularization of America go on around him. He often calls liberals and Democrats evil, but when I actually talk to him about my liberal policy beliefs he thinks they are alright. Growing up I remember him calling Charles Krauthammer the smartest man in America very often. He voted for Jeb Bush in the 2016 primary. He thought John McCain was awesome.

I would get him National Review and Reason. You asked for print, so I’m not recommending The Bulwark and The Dispatch, but you should also try to get him to read The Bulwark and the Dispatch. Or at least listen to some of their podcasts.

David K: What do you think about rent control laws? Are they ever helpful or necessary? Articles like this pop up all the time in the NYT, and I think get interpreted as this great thing that allows artists and creative types to thrive. Seems like the real story is just some lucky guy that got to inherit an unfair regulatory benefit and now is using that to make his own profit by renting out his space. Do you agree?

Land use reform creates significant economic gains, and it’s important to parcel out those gains in a way that creates a broad winning political coalition. Under the right circumstances, including rent control ideas in a broad reform package could be good. But in isolation, you are right — rent control is a windfall for a discrete number of tenants and not a real solution to fundamental housing issues.

One thing I do think we should think about is whether there aren’t things governments could do on the financing side to encourage longer-term leases with more pricing stability.

AM: You were a speaker at the Effective Altruism conference this weekend - what did you make of it? Where do you disagree with EA most?

This is a spicy take, but I’m not sure how much EA is a doctrine that one could agree or disagree with at this point. It’s a community.

And the community includes, for example, enough people who are devoted to animal welfare that the norm in the community is for all the food at EA events to be plant-based. And that continues to be the norm even though these days the EA community’s highest-status leaders are primarily focused on existential risk questions rather than animal welfare. And in fact, the norm is so strong that lots of the leading voices on x-risk issues are themselves vegan. As a non-vegan who often feels bad about it, I have to say I enjoyed being in the EA bubble for several days — it’s super easy and enjoyable to eat a plant-based diet if all the food put in front of you is plant-based.

But all of that is to say that the propositional content of EA has gotten stretched pretty thin. “You should try to be effective rather than ineffective” isn’t a claim anyone is going to disagree with, and “it’s important to try to do good in the world” is also pretty banal.

What you’re really left evaluating is a set of people and institutions, not a set of ideas. And I am pretty favorably inclined toward those institutions. I’m very familiar with the work of Open Philanthropy, and I think it’s generally excellent. I’ve met a bunch of Open Phil people over the years and they are very smart and conscientious. They also have a good track record of identifying smart, conscientious people to fund. I am less personally familiar with the Centre for Effective Altruism people, and the FTX Future Fund is much newer and doesn’t have as much of a track-record, so I discount my credence in them somewhat relative to Open Philanthropy. But these are all, in my experience, good organizations. If I hear they are taking on some new venture, my prior is going to be that it is probably a good idea.

And in that light, my main criticism is that I think as a set of institutions, it is sometimes too much an inward-focused “scene,” rather than maintaining full focus on engaging with the outside world in the most effective possible way.

Steam Community :: Guide :: Haadrak's Giant Guide to Torchlight II

steamcommunity.com

Steam Community :: Guide :: Haadrak's Giant Guide to Torchlight II

By Haadrak

51 - 65 minutes

Introduction

Torchlight 2, like Diablo 3 and Path of Exile, has been around for a long time however I believe that we do not have the same strengths of builds that exist within D3 and PoE owing to the fact that these games have mechanisms of competition that expose weak builds. We also lack a lot of the online community that these games have of sharing knowledge that increases the strengths of builds, this guide aims to change that.

This guide will delve into quite some depth regarding various mechanics. They are there if you are interested but they are not mandatory for your understanding of the game nor is understanding them requisite for enjoyment of the game. They are there so that people can discuss the mechanics and make more educated choices about their items and builds should they wish to do so but if putting 1 point in every skill makes you happy, you do you boo. Feel free to skip sections that are very mechanics heavy if you just want something that tells you what is good and what isn't. This isn't a guide telling you how to have fun!

***Disclaimer: I play this game on PC. I do not own this game on console, nor have I played it on console. There may be some differences between the versions I am unaware of however if you bring them to my attention with the proper amount of evidence I am happy to add them in.***

Basic Mechanics

In this section I'm are going to cover the basic mechanics of the game how they interract together and a lot of the common misconceptions within the game. Torchlight 2 has a lot of depth people don't realise it has.

The Main Stats

Strength

Strength primarily does two things. It increases your weapon DPS by 0.5% per point and increases your Critical Strike Damage by 0.4% per point. it is important to note however that this does not tell the whole story. Firstly, lets discuss Critical Hit Damage. Critical Hit Damage obviously increases the amount of damage your critical hits deal. By default, i.e. with no strength, a character that lands a critical hit will hit for 1.5 times their normal damage. The CHD damage cap is +500% which means that theoretically you can deal 6 times as much damage (100% of normal damage +500%) as you normally would with a critical hit. However the amount of CHD you can gain from strength is limited to 399.6% or 400% just to make it easier for you which is the equivalent of 999 or 1000 strength. This means that if you are aiming to hit the CHD cap you won't be able to do it from strength alone. The Rambren Skull[tidbi.ru] gives +60% CHD and therefore you would only need 975 Strength optimally to achieve the theoretical max CHD however this is often impractical.

Dexterity

Dexterity fulfills two roles as both an offensive and defensive stat. It also however is somewhat confusing to newer players as neither the dodge component nor the Critical Hit Chance component scale linearly with the amount of dexterity you have. The formula they both follow is: ((0.2002-0.0002*Dex)*Dex). If you plot this you'll notice its actually a parabola and that your stats should actually start decreasing after you reach 500 dexterity. Don't worry, the game ignores your dexterity growth after 500 however it does mean that there is a hard cap from the benefits of dexterity for both CHC and dodge.

It also reduces the damage lost on fumbles at a rate of 2/7% per point or 0.2857% per point whichever you prefer. Don't ask me how they arrived at that number.

Focus

The mother of all stats. This stat is, quite frankly over tuned. There is a reason that there is a focus based build for every single class in the game that is elite viable. A single point of focus does the following:

    Increases your execute change by ((0.2002-0.0002*Focus)*Focus). (Hey there's that formula again).

    0.5 Mana per point, rounded down.

    Increases Magic Damage by 0.5% per point*.

It should also be noted that after rigorous testing I've noted some other things. Your passive base mana regeneration rate is (YourManaPool/25). This does not change regardless of combat state. This means a couple of things. Firstly it means it always takes 25 seconds for you to replenish all of your mana from 0 assuming no other mana regeneration effects. Secondly it also means that if your mana pool is large enough, you don't need additional sources of mana regeneration, because your base mana regeneration rate will be so large that it will eclipse anything you could cast.

Regarding execution, you have a base execution rate of 9.8% don't ask me how the developers arrived at this number, maybe they have a fondness for gravity. Anyway with that taken into account the execution cap from Focus is 59.8%.

The most important thing is that focus is the least capped stat which is why it is the most overtuned stat along with how many things it affects.

Vitality

Finally we come with a bump to the unwanted, red-headed step child of stats, Vitality. I wish it weren't the case but Vitality is just so useless. At face value vitality might appear to be a good stat, maybe even a great stat. Here's what a point in Vitality gets you:

    Increases your HP by 3.6 rounded down.

    Increases your armour by 0.25% rounded up to the nearest 0.x% so 0.25% becomes 0.3%

    Increases your Block Chance by ((0.2002-0.0002*Vit)*Vit). There's that pesky formula again.

So then why is Vitality so bad? Well firstly armour is almost useless late game but I'll explain that later. Secondly the return on HP is very poor. For a single gem socket you can get 1540 HP just by using a Skull of Riechliu[tidbi.ru] which is the equivalent of 427.77 vitality. Which just leaves Block.

Block has a hard cap of 75%. Most of the Passive spells in the game aren't that useful which means using a spell slot to increase you blocking chance by 12% with Tome: Blocking VI[tidbi.ru] already gives you 12% of that. Then you have the shield itself. Most shields are actually not that strong realistically the only contenders are the Netherrealm Shield[tidbi.ru] and Parma's Coal Burner[tidbi.ru]. The Netherrealm shield offers 2 extra sockets and a couple of fairly minor buffs but Parma's Coal burner offers a whopping 45% block chance meaning that the player only requires an additional 18% block chance which requires a paltry 100 Vitality if we solve for x using the formula ((0.2002-0.0002*x)*x)=18 and round up.

I would provide references to a lot of these formulae however I orininally found them on the runic forums which have since been taken down and no sadly no archive of them exists anywhere I can find.

Dealing Damage

The following sections deals with the mechanics of dealing damage.

Auto Attacks

Auto attacks are actually one of the most simple mechanics in Torchlight 2. Unfortunately for me, most builds barely use them at all so their damage calculations are not that useful. Some weapons deal damage via physical damage and some via magical damage. Some weapons do a combination of the two. The way damage is calculated is as follows:

Damage = (Physical Damage * (Strength Bonus + % Physical Damage Modifers + Other Modifiers) + Magical Damage * (Strength Bonus + Focus Bonus + Other Modifiers)) + 1

Other modifiers are as follows:

    +%All Damage

    Elemental Damage bonuses such as +15% Fire Damage obviously only increase their respective element.

    +%Melee Damage (For weapons classed as melee weapons)

    +%Ranged Damage (For weapons classed as ranged weapons)

    +%Wands and Staves (Wands also count as ranged and Staves also count as melee)

    +%Damage bonus while Dual wielding (A shield does not count as a weapon for this purpose)

(the + 1 is clearly the most important part)

Now obviously every weapon (at least I think every weapon) has maximum and minimum ranges for their damage. How this works is that the game calculates the damage for the minimum damage you would do and the same for the maximum damage you would do and then generates a random number between those two values. Gems or enchantments that add Flat damage like +15 Fire Damage modify the weapon's base damage in effect and are not modifiers.

You may have also noticed that focus increases a weapon's magic damage while strength also increases a weapon's magic damage. This means there aren't times where strength is useless but it also means that on magic weapons you can choose to use strength or focus to increase your damage. Yet another reason focus is so strong. Also obviously if your weapon does fire damage fire modifiers will be added to the fire damage separately but not apply to the rest of the magic damage.

Fumbles

Fumbles are if you like, negative critical hits. Whenever you auto attack there is a 21% chance that you will 'fumble' the attack causing you to lose damage on the attack. I should mention that skills cannot be fumbled which is why most experienced players prefer builds based around the use of skills rather than builds based around auto-attacking.

The formula used for calculating fumbles is a little complicated because it breaks up each component of the damage and in effect "fumbles" it individually. This is made further more complex when you consider that in my testing a weapon that did 24-47 physical damage, 24-47 electric damage and 24-47 poison damage somehow had a differing amount of maximum damage calculated for the physical and electric damage by 1 but yet the poison and electric maximums were the same. Nevertheless an approximation is as follows:

Remember when reading this formula that Fumble Damage Reduction is a -% so adding it to things actually takes it away. YEAH MATHS!

Fumble Damage = Physical Damage * (1 + Fumble Damage Reduction) + Magical Damage * (1 + Fumble Damage Reduction)

Again like for the auto attacks the game calculates the minimum and maximum values and then picks a random number between them.

Splash Damage

Splash Damage in Torchlight 2 is a bit odd and to be honest, generally not worth worrying about. Firstly it only procs off of auto attacks. Secondly ranged weapons, even those like shotgonnes and cannons which technically do "splash damage" do not actually proc splash damage the way it works nor can any ranged weapon proc spash damage. Only melee weapons can deal spash damage. Here are their profiles:

    1H Axes, Maces & Swords - Range 1.1m, 25% Splash, 60° Arc

    2H Axes, Maces & Swords - Range 1.6m, 50% Splash, 120° Arc

    Staves - Range 1.6m, 50% Splash, 100° Arc

    Polearms - Range 2.6m, 50% Splash, 120° Arc

Splash damage has no discernable cap or at least none that it is possible using normal itemisation. Why you would want to stack it is also beyond me, although it might be amusing to make a built around only being able to kill what you're not aiming at.

Regarding Shotgonnes and Cannons these two weapons do not actually have a standard auto attack but rather a template with which they use to attack. This is why they do not benefit from splash damage. Shotgonnes do 100% damage to all targets within an arc 5° either side of the initial target and 30% damage 10° further on from that. Cannons do 100% Damage within a 12.5° arc either side and 50% damage 15° either side of that.

Weapon DPS Based Attacks

The previously mentioned auto attack formula discussed is used to work out Weapon DPS.

WDPS = Weapon Damage / Attacks Per Second.

Now as per usual because nothing in Torchlight 2 could ever be simple that dual wielding weapons works slightly differently. Dual wielding only uses the DPS from your main hand weapon. What this means is that if you are Dual wielding and using 2 different weapons your main hand weapon should always be the higher dps of the two. Its also another reason why I don't really think dual wielding builds are very good but that is an opinion and who am I to tell you how to have fun?

Magic Based Attacks

In Torchlight 2 a Magic attack is any attack that does a flat number of damage rather than a % of Weapon DPS. Focus boosts all magic attacks. This results in some strange outcomes like the fact that the Engineer's Shield Bash skill which does 7.5/10/12.5 * Your Shield's Armour value in damage actually counts as a magic attack and is boosted by focus. This is yet another reason why focus is so strong because it affects a wide range of skills you normally wouldn't expect to benefit from.

Magic Damage is calculated as:

Damage = Flat Damage * (%Focus Bonus + Additional Bonuses)

Additional Bonuses are as follows:

    +% All Damage

    Each Element will obviously benefit from its respective +% Damage Type

As per usual the game calculates both the minimum and maxium possible damage and then generates a random value between that number inclusive.

I should mention that Damage over Time skills or DoTs are calculated identically however DoTs in Torchlight cannot critically hit.

Critical Hits

In my belief, Critical Hits are one of the most poorly understood mechanics in Torchlight 2 and I think it stems from 2 factors. Most games allow you to have some aspect of control over your chance to critically hit but not usually your critical hit modifier, the second is the fact that spells are affected by an internal spell critical hit modifier but more on that later.

Firstly I'll rediscuss Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage here. The cap for CHD is 500%, you have a base 50%, 399.6% can come from strength which means if you want to hit the cap you need a further 50.4%. This can come from gear, enchantments or socketables. Next is CHC. Obviously having a CHC above 100% makes no sense but other than that there is no inherent cap to CHC which means you can have a 100% chance to critically hit, in theory. Again, more on that later. You can get 50.1% CHC from dexterity which means if you want 100% CHC you need 49.9% from gear, enchantments or socketables.

Regarding the formula each individual component of the damage crits individually. This does not mean that the chance to crit is calculated individually, either your whole attack critically hits, or doesn't, rather the increase in damage is calculated separately and then added together.

Critical Hit Damage = Physical Damage * (Critical Hit Modifier + 1) + Magical Damage * (Critical Hit Modifier + 1)

SoakScale And You

"What is SoakScale and why do I care?" I hear you ask, well SoakScale is an inherent modifier on every skill in the game. What it is meant to do, as far as I can tell, is control the amount of armour applied to a skill. i.e. If a skill has 50% SoakScale, only 50% of the armour of a target should be applied to the relevant damage. Its basically armour penetration value.

However it appears that there is a bug with SoakScale that has been prevalent since the beginning of the game. SoakScale also appears to modify the critical hit chance of a skill by the same amount. Don't ask me why. I don't know. I just know from testing a variety of abilities that it most definitely holds true. This leads to strange occurences like the Embermage's Prismatic Bolt skill, which has a SoakScale of 8, also having a Critical Hit Chance of 8% with a character that has 100% chance to critically hit. In other words, on Prismatic Bolt builds, CHC and CHD are not very useful stats.

I plan to show the ins and outs of every skill at a later date, including the actual critical hit chances of the skills, however for the mean time just know this; just because you have a CHC of x% does not mean the skill you're using does.

I will hopefully be getting around to a guide that discusses every skill and its ISCHM in detail at a later date. Just know that just because you have a critical hit rate of x% does not mean the spell you're using does.

Damage: Order of Calculations

So some of you might be thinking "I can see why the order of calculations matters for defence, but why damage?" Well its largely to do with fumbles. You see if you fumble in this game fumbles can't critically hit. This is one of the reasons auto-attack builds are so poor because you have an innate 21% chance to fumble an attack which means that even if you have the Dexterity cap, meaning that fumbles still do full damage, you still cannot crit on that attack basically lowering your CHC by 21%. The order of Damage calculations however is as follows:

    Initial Damage Calculation

    Fumble Chance

    Critical Hit Chance

    Splash Damage

    Status Effects

Status Effects

The normal Status Effects all characters are likely to encounter are the Burned, Shocked, Frozen and Poisoned effects for each of the elements respectively.

    Burn scales with level, Focus and of course the other modifiers that would normally affect fire damage. Burn also ignores armour. However it generally doesn't hit very hard. Some skills trigger higher power burn effects.

    Shocked causes enemies to emit sparks that bounce randomly along the ground. These appear to scale with level however they also appear to be affected by armour making it very difficult to discern their damage effects. Note they really don't do very much damage.

    Frozen causes enemies to start singing let it snow and your ears to start bleeding...of course I kid. I just causes a reduction in movement, attack and cast speed of 33%.

    Poisoned reduces both the armour and damage output by 33%. This debuff is particularly nasty if it affects you early on when you are dependent on armour for tankiness.

In addition to these effects there are other less common effects:

    Bleed - Bleed is much like burn but a purely physical effect. However being a flat damage effect it too is "magical" and therefore affected by Focus.

    Blindness - Blindness is one of the few effects that actually works differently depending upon whether it is cast on mobs or players. On mobs it reduces their aggro radius, on players it reduces their vision circle around the player.

    Draw - Draw pulls the target closer to the caster.

    Flee - Causes enemies to run away. I'm not sure if this has any effect on players.

    Immobilise - Immobilise forces the target to stand in place. You may not rotate during this period either. Immobilisation reduction effects reduce the duration of this effect. You can have 100% immobilisation reduction effectively granting you immunity to immobilisation effects.

    Knockback - Does what it says on the tin, knocks the target back. Knockback reduction reduces the distance you are knocked back and again you can have 100% knockback reduction.

    Stun - Again not much to say here. There aren't many mobs in the game that stun. Most Bosses have heavy resistance to stun which is why a lot of skills say things like "110% chance to stun".

    Slow - There are three types of slows. Movement slows, attack speed slows and casting speed slows. Some abilities do all three, some do varying amounts of all three and some only do one or two.

Conveys Effects

So the Conveys keyword adds yet another layer of complexity. Conveys however is special because unlike normal weapon effects Conveys weapon effects also propagate the effect, in full to any skills and splash damage. Basically any target hit by something, while you have a Conveys effect, will transfer the full effect to the target, regardless of the source of the damage. There may be exceptions to this however I currently haven't found any. If you find some, please let me know.

Defence

Now we move on to defence and why a lot of the systems that Torchlight 2 has to offer while complex are sadly near pointless.

One thing of note, your prioritisation regarding defence will be different depending on how seriously you take this game, how much time you intend to invest in farming and the difficulty level you have chosen. There is no point grinding for hours and hours to make some incredibly tanky character if you're playing on casual where the monsters largely hit like wet noodles.

Defence: Order of Calculations

Firstly we need to cover the order of calculations regarding defence which will help explain why some defensive stats fair so poorly while others, so well. The order is as follows:

    Missile Reflect

    Dodge

    Block

    Armour

    Damage Reduction

    Damage Absorption

    Health

Missile Reflect gets procced as this is obviously the logical choice. You'd be a bit annoyed if you had a high chance to reflect missiles and you kept dodging out of the way of them instead. It should be noted that for some reason despite just about everything else in this game stacking additively Missile Reflect stacks multiplicatively. Anyway its not on many items and its just kinda nice to have there aren't a huge number of mobs out there that use missiles I wouldn't go making a build out of it.

Next we have dodge. This is nice and simple. You dodge something, no damage. Your dodge chance is your dodge chance. The hard cap for dodge is 75%. Its a miracle, Torchlight 2 actually did something simple.The Formula is just:

Chance of being hit = 1 - Dodge Chance

Again block we've already discussed and works very similarly to dodge. The formula is identical. Not much to say here.

Next Armour, Ok, back to the land of complexities. So armour, in essence reduces the amount of damage you take from a source by between the amount of armour you have and 50% of your armour value. So if you get hit by 20 damage and have 10 armour you will take between 10 and 15 damage. The type of armour used is the type of damage dealt. Simple. Except its not that simple because nothing in this game is ever that simple.

The complexity occurs when you have complex damage types. Lets use an example. Say you have have an axe that does 10 Physical damage and 10 Fire Damage and another axe that does 20 Physical Damage. Lets also say you have 0 Focus for this example to keep things as simple as possible. The point is the 2 axes do the same damage. However lets say you're using them against monsters that have 10 of every type of armour. If the game just naively applied the armour formula as I just described you would end up with a situation where weapons that did mixed damage did less damage than their pure counterparts because in our example the 20 Physical Damage axe would only be tested against the physical armour while the axe with 10 and 10 would be tested against both the Physical armour and the Fire Armour resulting in the pure Physical axe having a Damage range of between 10 - 15 and the split damage axe having a damage range of between 0 - 10.

In order to prevent this the game uses proportionality to work this out. Basically first the game adds up all of the damage an incoming attack will do. It then divides each component by the total damage to get the proportionality of that component. This should be some number between 0 and 1. It then multiplies the corresponding resistance by that number before doing the armour calculation. Lets do an example:

I am hit by a monster that does 30 Physical Damage and 60 Ice Damage. I have 100 Physical Armour and 50 Ice Armour. Firstly the game adds the damage of the incoming attack together and then divides each component. 30/90 = 1/3, 60/90 = 2/3. Then we multiply my respective armours by these amounts. 100 * 1/3 = 33.333, 50 * 2/3 = 33.333. Finally we apply the armour formula individually and see that the first part of the attack will deal between 13.333 and 0 damage and the second part will deal between 33.333 and 16.667.

Now that all of that explanation is out of the way I now get to explain why that incredibly interesting and complex system is largely useless. It really does hurt. Damage Reduction is applied after armour is. Obviously this reduces the amount of damage you take up to a maximum of 75%. However it also therefore decreases the effectiveness of armour by that much too. I'll give an example:

Imagine you get hit by a hit for 1000 Damage and you have 200 Armour. Now lets say for a moment that your armour rolls for the maximum amount and saves you the full 200 damage its capable of. So you take an 800 Damage hit. Now lets say you have the cap of 75% damage reduction which is recommended for late game elite difficulty. This reduces the hit you just took to a paltry 200 Damage. However now lets look at the same scenario but remove the armour from the equation. You take the 1000 damage and this time it goes straight through. Now your damage reduction kicks in and reduces it to 250 damage. Notice how that 200 armour actually only ended up saving you 50 damage even when it max rolled? This is why armour isn't very good. Not to mention the fact that its tied to vitality and is hard to stack without sacrificing other much more useful stats. I wish they had thought about this more before choosing this order of damage.

I should also mention here that the two melee classes, the Engineer and the Berserker, have an innate 25% damage resistance. This stacks additively.

After this is Damage absorption effects like the Engineer's Forcefield. Incidentally this is why Forcefield is so strong while Aegis is so weak. Forcefield benefits from all these effects before it takes a hit meaning it stays strong for a long time. Aegis on the other hand requires a hit to go through everything before it even has a chance to proc. In short, never take Aegis.

Finally, after all of this you take damage, or maybe the hit never gets here because you have so many defensive stats. At least that's the plan.

Farming

Now we come to a part of the guide I've all been waiting for, a part that's not exclusively about maths...and its, yeah, largely about maths. Sorry. So farming in Torchlight 2 is a little different from games like Diablo 3 and PoE mainly because a lot of the gear you're going to want isn't necessarily located at the end of the game. This often leads to a weird sensation where you have to start farming for your final set of gear very early on in the game. The second and most important thing I can tell you is a lot of items become extinct over the course of normal playthroughs. I know this sounds like the end of the world but its more I want to draw people's attention to it before before they potentially make game altering decisions rather than after. I should mention, nothing is unsalvagable, but some things are more difficult to salvage than others.

Right, what have I just been talking about? Well if you have a look at the modding tools items have two particularly important attributes as described here[docs.runicgames.com]. They are:

MAXLEVEL

INTEGER

Percent of the spawn level graph to use for the top end of the dungeon level spawn range.

MINLEVEL

INTEGER

Percent of the spawn level graph to use for the low end of the dungeon level spawn range roll.

These two particular values are of importance because they affect what dungeon levels an item can spawn from. Every dungeon has a level range that it can generate. This basically means that monsters will be around your level up to a limit and if you are a very high level and go to a low level area you will still find low level monsters and vice versa.

What this means for farming however is that if you're trying to find an item outside the level range of the level you're in it will never drop. While you might be thinking "Ok but I can just go back to an area where it can drop can't I?" Well not always. See with the New Game+ modes this increases the Dungeon levels of areas and you can't go backwards with regards to NG+ levels, nor can you join games that have differing NG+ levels. This means that if you want a level 50 item on your NG5+ character the only way to obtain it is through mapping or trading.

Some people may not necessarily think mapping is so bad however there are reasons why I would be hesitant to suggest mapping as a primary source for getting items. Firstly Skulls. Skulls are the best socketables within Torchlight 2 and definitely something you will need to farm for if you are building an end game oriented elite character. However skulls only drop from blue chests. Yes, that's right. Those boss chests, bosses themselves and golden chests in the game are actually worse loot generators than the blue chests. I'm not sure if this is intentional or not. What this actually means though is that the best farming locations for skulls are not those that involve killing anything, sadly.

Phase Beast Farming

This brings us to Phase Beast farming. Phase Beasts are beasts you can find in the large areas such as the Ossean Wastes which take you to a mini challenge. Some of them involve puzzles, or fighting a mini boss and some of them involve protecting objects or racing around looting things within a time limit. The thing is, the way you're intended to do them is you jump into the Phase Portal, complete the challenge then exit through the exit portal at which point the entry to the Phase Beast Challenge closes and you can no longer complete it.

The developers forgot one tiny thing however. Because the Phase Beast Challenge area counts as its own area, you can quit the game and your character is saved in the Phase Beast Challenge. This means that you can complete the challenge, quit to the menu screen, load your character again and repeat until you either have your items or you can't take the boredom any more. I highly recommend setting up a movie, TV show or stream on a second monitor if you can.

I have linked a youtube videos made by fireball1303 that shows the best challenge to farm.

The other location to farm is a Phase Beast in the Frosted Hills which involves protecting 4 crystals from goblin hordes. For every crystal after the first you protect, you receive a blue chest at the end of the challenge.

Quantity & Quality

Alright, we know where you know where you're getting your items, now how many? This is where Torchlight 2's magic find mechanic comes in. Firstly, the sources; you can obtain it from items and socketables as well as from the passive spell Tome: Treasure Hunter I[tidbi.ru]. I should note here that you can equip this on your pet and it will increase your magic finding stat. (I should also note here that the Tome: Animal Handling I[tidbi.ru] does not work this way because it increases your pet's minion damage statistics rather than yours.)

Now what does the Magic Finding statistic actually do? Well its complicated. To be honest with this game it'd be easier to mention what's simple. Firstly what it doesn't do. It doesn't increase the amount of loot you'll find. What it does do is increase the quality of some of the items you'll find. Its that some that's really at the heart of the issue.

So basically if you go through GUTS and look at monsters and chests and what they can spawn you find they often have a series of items they can spawn. For example lets look at the famous blue chest or as it is known in GUTS, TREASURE_CHEST_HUGE. This can spawn a number of classes of items:

    TREASURE_SKULLCHANCE_FORSUPERCHESTS

    GOLD_PIECES

    CHEST_TREASURE_SECONDARY_GOOD

    CHEST_TREASURE_PRIMARY_GOODER

No I didn't make those up, I wish I did though....anyway. The interesting takeaway here is the Min and Max stats which control how many of each item drop but more interestingly still is the MagicFind stat. Each treasure source has a MagicFind stat which is a percentage and I can only surmise from looking at the values that the MagicFind stat changes which sources your magic find stat affects.

With this information in hand I can say that if you're farming skulls, magic find is completely useless for you as the only thing that drop skulls has a 0 MagicFind stat. However if you're farming for legendary items Magic Find might be just what you need. However when in doubt, ways of moving faster and clearing more efficiently always increase your farm speed so don't overlook them.

Choosing Items to Farm For

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make, is simply getting armour that has a high ilvl because it has a high ilvl. Lets take a very common example I see. You want to build an Emberquake Engineer. Sounds good. You're choosing your rings and you immediately choose the highest ilvl rings which happen to be Mondon's Ring[tidbi.ru]. First, lets look at what this does:

Mondon's Ring

-94 to All Armor per hit

2% increase in magic-finding Luck

+12% Damage to secondary targets

6% chance to reflect missiles at 50% weapon DPS

All Damage Taken is reduced by -2%

Charge rate increased by 10%

Ok so right of the bat -94 to All Armour per hit is not very useful for an Emberquaker Engineer. Then we have a paltry 2% increase in MF. Which if you already have all your gear probably isn't going to be that helpful, but it gets worse. You get 12% damage to secondary targets which will do nothing for a well built Emberquaker, 6% chance to reflect missiles at 50% weapon DPS, again fairly meagre, All Damage Taken is reduced by -2%, not that useful when it doesn't add to 5% and you still need to waste an enormous amount of your item budget to get there and the only decent part of the item; Charge rate increased by 10%.

Comparatively lets look at Pandectos[tidbi.ru].

Pandectos

+50% to Fire Damage

+224 Health

Ok so the Health isn't great but wait...+50% to fire damage, which is your main source of damage. That is the equivalent of 100 Focus, to put that into perspective. Pandectos, for those that are interested are an ilvl 58 item. Now you might be about to say "What about the set bonus on Mondon's?" To be honest its pretty lacklustre. Most of the bonuses are. This isn't Diablo 3 where your class is made or broken by set bonuses.

So this is why I tell people that choosing gear is a little more complicated than simply "choose the one with the highest ilvl".

Enchantments

But wait, its gets more complicated. See there is some advantage to choosing items with high ilvls. Basically the strength of an enchantment is tied to the ilvl of an item. This means a couple of things. Firstly, items may initially appear to not be so great but because of their ilvl they have a much greater potential but secondly, potential is exactly that, potential. One of my teachers used to say that potential was just a fancy way of saying you haven't done anything yet. He was right.

Anyway, the point is that sometimes it can be very difficult to analyse the strengths of two different items because with ideal enchantments, one may become better than the other over time however sometimes you may want to keep both because it may be a very close run thing.

The formula used by enchanters to calculate the power of an enchant for stat enchantments is:

EnchantmentPower = ilvl / 3 + 1

Other enchantments use a different formulae. I am currently trying to work this out now.

A massive thanks to Steamuser ADEC Inc who figured this out through testing.

The game will then multiply the enchantment power by an enchantment modifier based on the enchantment chosen. Here is a list of the enchantments with their multipliers and weights below:

Enchantment List

LEGEND:

Weight - How often this enchantment occurs. Bear in mind that this is calculated against all other enchantments in the enchantment pool. So an enchanter with a large enchantment pool has a low chance of having an enchantment occur with a weight of 10 whereas the same enchantment might have a very high chance of occur with a much smaller pool of enchantments.

[CRITICAL] - This simply indicates the enchantment is a critical version of the enchantment. Some enchantments do not have normal versions. No additional effects will occur outside of the screen flashing if one of these enchantments occurs.

[G] - Enchantments done by Garbahd the Enchanter, located at the Elemental Oasis in Act III.

[V] - Enchantment done by Vaneez the Poisoner, located at the Ship Graveyard in Act II and also randomly spawning with a weight of 25 or a 19.69% chance. Max Enchantments 2.

[Bo] - Enchantments done by Borris the Stout randomly spawning with a weight of 10 or a 7.87% chance. Max Enchantments 3.

[M] - Enchantments done by Mooritz of the Desert randomly spawning with a weight of 10 or a 7.87% chance. Max Enchantments 3.

[F] - Enchantments done by Farquez the Assassin spawning with a weight of 10or a 7.87% chance.

[P] - Enchantments done by Panosh of the North randomly spawning with a weight of 10 or a 7.87% chance. Max Enchantments 3.

[T] - Enchantments done by Telsor of the Storm randomly spawning with a weight of 10 or a 7.87% chance. Max Enchantments 3.

[Fi] - Enchantments done by Filip the Lucky randomly spawning with a weight of 10 or a 7.87% chance.

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Electric Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.09 - 0.12, Weight 5 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Fire Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.09 - 0.12, Weight 5 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Ice Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.09 - 0.12, Weight 5 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Poison Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.09 - 0.12, Weight 5 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, +% Dodge chance, Modifer 0.03 - 0.05, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, +% Dual Wield Damage, Modifer 0.06 - 0.1, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, -% Electric Damage Taken, Modifier -0.04 - -0.06, Weight 5 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, -% Fire Damage Taken, Modifier -0.04 - -0.06, Weight 5 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, -% chance to Fumble, Modifier -0.07 - 0.1, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, -% Ice Damage Taken, Modifier -0.04 - -0.06, Weight 5 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, +% Increases All Damage, 0.06 - 0.09, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, +% Increases Melee Weapon Damage, 0.06 - 0.09, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, -% Poison Damage Taken, Modifier -0.04 - -0.06, Weight 5 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Weapon, % chance to call forth the Skull, 0.03 - 0.03, Weight 1 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Armour, +% Increases Ranged Weapon Damage, 0.06 - 0.09, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Gloves, Helmet, -% reduced item requirements, 0.05 - 0.07, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant 1H Axe, Mace, Sword, 2H Axe, Mace, Sword, Polearm, Staff, +% Damage to Secondary Targets, Modifier 0.3 - 0.45, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Bow, Cannon, Crossbow, Rifle, Wand, % chance to Immobilise, Modifier 0.06 - 0.09, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Any, +% increases Charge Rate, Modifier 0.06, 0.09, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Boots, Pants, +% increase Movement Speed, Modifier 0.04 - 0.06, Weight 10 [CRITICAL][G]

    Enchant Weapon, % chance to Poison, Modifier 0.04 - 0.15, Weight 10 [V][F]

    Enchant Armour, +% Poison Damage, Modifer 0.04 - 0.15, Weight 10 [V][F]

    Enchant Weapon, + Poison Damage, Modifier 0.06 - 0.18, Weight 30 [V][F]

    Enchant Weapon, + Poison Damage, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 6 [CRITICAL][V][F]

    Enchant Armour, -% Poison Damage Taken, Modifier -0.06 - -0.18, Weight 10 [V][F]

    Enchant Armour, -% Poison Damage Taken, Modifier -0.2 - -0.25, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][V][F]

    Enchant Armour, + Poison Armour, Modifier 0.06 - 0.18, Weight 30 [V][F]

    Enchant Armour, + Poison Armour, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 6 [CRITICAL][V][F]

    Enchant Armour, Poison Damage Reflected, Modifier 0.06, 0.18, Weight 15 [V][F]

    Enchant Armour, Poison Damage Reflected, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 3 [CRITICAL][V][F]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Poison Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.03 - 0.08, Weight 20 [V][F]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Poison Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.11 - 0.14, Weight 4 [CRITICAL][V][F]

    Enchant Weapon, % chance to Shock, Modifier 0.04 - 0.1, Weight 10 [T]

    Enchant Weapon, % chance to Shock, Modifier 0.12 - 0.15, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][T]

    Enchant Armour, + Electric Armour, Modifier 0.06 - 0.18, Weight 30 [T]

    Enchant Armour, + Electric Armour, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 6 [CRITICAL][T]

    Enchant Weapon, + Electric Damage, Modifier 0.06 - 0.18, Weight 30 [T]

    Enchant Weapon, + Electric Damage, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 6 [CRITICAL][T]

    Enchant Armour, +% Electric Damage, Modifer 0.04 - 0.10, Weight 10 [T]

    Enchant Armour, -% Electric Damage Taken, Modifier -0.04 - -0.1, Weight 10 [T]

    Enchant Armour, -% Electric Damage Taken, Modifier -0.12 - -0.15, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][T]

    Enchant Armour, +% Electric Damage, Modifer 0.12 - 0.15, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][T]

    Enchant Armour, Electric Damage Reflected, Modifier 0.06, 0.18, Weight 15 [T]

    Enchant Armour, Electric Damage Reflected, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 3 [CRITICAL][T]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Electric Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.03 - 0.08, Weight 20 [T]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Electric Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.11 - 0.14, Weight 4 [CRITICAL][T]

    Enchant Weapon, % chance to Burn, Modifier 0.04 - 0.1, Weight 10 [M]

    Enchant Weapon, % chance to Burn, Modifier 0.12 - 0.15, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][M]

    Enchant Armour, + Fire Armour, Modifier 0.06 - 0.18, Weight 30 [M]

    Enchant Armour, + Fire Armour, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 6 [CRITICAL][M]

    Enchant Weapon, + Fire Damage, Modifier 0.06 - 0.18, Weight 30 [M]

    Enchant Weapon, + Fire Damage, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 6 [CRITICAL][M]

    Enchant Armour, +% Fire Damage, Modifer 0.04 - 0.10, Weight 10 [M]

    Enchant Armour, -% Fire Damage Taken, Modifier -0.04 - -0.1, Weight 10 [M]

    Enchant Armour, -% Fire Damage Taken, Modifier -0.12 - -0.15, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][M]

    Enchant Armour, +% Fire Damage, Modifer 0.12 - 0.15, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][M]

    Enchant Armour, Fire Damage Reflected, Modifier 0.06, 0.18, Weight 15 [M]

    Enchant Armour, Fire Damage Reflected, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 3 [CRITICAL][M]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Fire Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.03 - 0.08, Weight 20 [M]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Fire Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.11 - 0.14, Weight 4 [CRITICAL][M]

    Enchant Weapon, % chance to Freeze, Modifier 0.04 - 0.1, Weight 10 [P]

    Enchant Weapon, % chance to Freeze, Modifier 0.12 - 0.15, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][P]

    Enchant Armour, + Ice Armour, Modifier 0.06 - 0.18, Weight 30 [P]

    Enchant Armour, + Ice Armour, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 6 [CRITICAL][P]

    Enchant Weapon, + Ice Damage, Modifier 0.06 - 0.18, Weight 30 [P]

    Enchant Weapon, + Ice Damage, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 6 [CRITICAL][P]

    Enchant Armour, +% Ice Damage, Modifer 0.04 - 0.10, Weight 10 [P]

    Enchant Armour, -% Ice Damage Taken, Modifier -0.04 - -0.1, Weight 10 [P]

    Enchant Armour, -% Ice Damage Taken, Modifier -0.12 - -0.15, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][P]

    Enchant Armour, +% Ice Damage, Modifer 0.12 - 0.15, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][P]

    Enchant Armour, Ice Damage Reflected, Modifier 0.06, 0.18, Weight 15 [P]

    Enchant Armour, Ice Damage Reflected, Modifier 0.2 - 0.25, Weight 3 [CRITICAL][P]

Enchantment List Cont.

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Ice Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.03 - 0.08, Weight 20 [P]

    Enchant Weapon, Conveys Ice Damage over 5 seconds, Modifier 0.11 - 0.14, Weight 4 [CRITICAL][P]

    Enchant Armour, -% chance to Fumble, Modifier 0.03 - 0.06, Weight 5 [Fi]

    Enchant Weapon, -% chance to Fumble, Modifier 0.07 - 0.09, Weight 5 [Fi]

    Enchant Armour, -% chance to Fumble, Modifier 0.08 - 0.1, Weight 1 [CRITICAL][Fi]

    Enchant Weapon, -% chance to Fumble, Modifier 0.12 - 0.16, Weight 1 [CRITICAL][Fi]

    Enchant Armour, +% increase in the amount of Experience Gained, Modifier 0.01 - 0.03, Weight 10 [Fi]

    Enchant Weapon, +% increase in the amount of Experience Gained, Modifier 0.01 - 0.03, Weight 10 [Fi]

    Enchant Armour, +% increase in the amount of Experience Gained, Modifier 0.04 - 0.05, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Fi]

    Enchant Weapon, +% increase in the amount of Experience Gained, Modifier 0.04 - 0.05, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Fi]

    Enchant Armour, +% increase in the amount of Gold Found, Modifier 0.04 - 0.1, Weight 15 [Fi]

    Enchant Weapon, +% increase in the amount of Gold Found, Modifier 0.04 - 0.1, Weight 15 [Fi]

    Enchant Armour, +% increase in the amount of Gold Found, Modifier 0.12 - 0.15, Weight 3 [CRITICAL][Fi]

    Enchant Weapon, +% increase in the amount of Gold Found, Modifier 0.12 - 0.15, Weight 3 [CRITICAL][Fi]

    Enchant Armour, +% increase in Magic-Finding Luck, Modifier 0.01 - 0.02, Weight 20 [Fi]

    Enchant Weapon, +% increase in Magic-Finding Luck, Modifier 0.01 - 0.03, Weight 20 [Fi]

    Enchant Armour, +% increase in Magic-Finding Luck, Modifier 0.03 - 0.04, Weight 4 [CRITICAL][Fi]

    Enchant Weapon, +% increase in Magic-Finding Luck, Modifier 0.04 - 0.05, Weight 4 [CRITICAL][Fi]

    Enchant Armour, + Vitality Attribute Bonus, Modifier 0.5 - 1.2, Weight 10 [Bo]

    Enchant Weapon, + Vitality Attribute Bonus, Modifier 0.5 - 1.2, Weight 10 [Bo]

    Enchant Armour, + Vitality Attribute Bonus, Modifier 1.5 - 2.0, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Bo]

    Enchant Weapon, + Vitality Attribute Bonus, Modifier 1.5 - 2.0, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Bo]

    Enchant Armour, + Dexterity Attribute Bonus, Modifier 0.5 - 1.2, Weight 10 [Bo]

    Enchant Weapon, + Dexterity Attribute Bonus, Modifier 0.5 - 1.2, Weight 10 [Bo]

    Enchant Armour, + Dexterity Attribute Bonus, Modifier 1.5 - 2.0, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Bo]

    Enchant Weapon, + Dexterity Attribute Bonus, Modifier 1.5 - 2.0, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Bo]

    Enchant Armour, + Focus Attribute Bonus, Modifier 0.5 - 1.2, Weight 10 [Bo]

    Enchant Weapon, + Focus Attribute Bonus, Modifier 0.5 - 1.2, Weight 10 [Bo]

    Enchant Armour, + Focus Attribute Bonus, Modifier 1.5 - 2.0, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Bo]

    Enchant Weapon, + Focus Attribute Bonus, Modifier 1.5 - 2.0, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Bo]

    Enchant Armour, + Strength Attribute Bonus, Modifier 0.5 - 1.2, Weight 10 [Bo]

    Enchant Weapon, + Strength Attribute Bonus, Modifier 0.5 - 1.2, Weight 10 [Bo]

    Enchant Armour, + Strength Attribute Bonus, Modifier 1.5 - 2.0, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Bo]

    Enchant Weapon, + Strength Attribute Bonus, Modifier 1.5 - 2.0, Weight 2 [CRITICAL][Bo]

Enchantments Cont.

The remaining Enchanters not mentioned can draw from a pool from seemingly all of these enchants. I will mention them here.

Enchanter Malo found in the Estherian Enclave. Maximum enchantments 1.

Tulio the Enchanter found in the Imperial Camp. Maximum enchantments 2.

Shemp the Enchanter found in the Minehead. Maximum enchantments 2.

Greezo the Enchanter found in the Mapworks. Maximum enchantments 3.

Jurick the Socketer spawning with a weight of 5 or a 3.94% chance. He will always enchant items to increase the number of sockets with a maximum of 2.

Fondo the Master spawning with a weight of 33 or a 25.98% chance. Maximum enchantments 3.

Karkozi the All-Powerful spawning with a weight of 4 or a 3.15% chance. Maximum enchantments 3.

Note: All these chances assume that the game is fair when choosing. As ADEC inc and I have discussed it is entirely possible this process is not fair and that elements parsed earlier in the choosing process have a higher chance of being chosen than those later in the choosing process. However without backwards engineering the game this would be almost impossible verify.

The second thing that I would like to mention about enchantments is that because of the way enchantments work, you have to disenchant a piece of gear to re-enchant it. Sometimes the rolls you got on it weren't great or they weren't the right stats. Because of this it often helps to have two sets of armour for enchantment. An 'A' set and a backup set that you use for enchanting purposes. If a backup piece rolls a better enchant than your main set, you can swap the pieces around and then resume enchanting the backup set and continue to improve your enchantments over time.

How to Design a Build

This part will probably be more interesting for a lot of you. Obviously you're going to have to choose a playstyle to go with and I can't help there however where I can help is from then on.

Assuming you have chosen a playstyle and a class the very first place I see most people go wrong, in my opinion, is their priorities. As far as I'm concerned when creating a build your priorities should be as such:

    Survivability

    Damage

    Mobility

    Utility

Now bear in mind that this is the priority for a solo build. Obviously if you are creating a build for team play and you are creating some form of utitility based class designed around increasing the capabilities of those around you, Utility would be much more important.

Why is this hard and why do people go wrong then? Well, to most people dealing the big numbers is cool and so they want a build that does that. Which is cool and all I get that, unfortunately if you do one big number and then keel over dead, your build won't get you very far. The second reason this is hard is because sometimes certain aspects of a build are multi-functional. For example lets look at the Embermage's Frost Phase.

This skill, you would think, based on my list, would fit squarely into the mobility priority and be fairly low down. The problem is that this skill also allows for rapid defensive mobility meaning that it can be used defensively as well by experienced players, both to kite and to extricate yourself from bad situations. This is where some intuition is going to have to come in on your part and honestly, the best way to work out some of these things a lot of the time is to simply play test them. I would like to add here I am not overly fond of Torchlight 2's restrictiveness with regards to respeccing because I believe it greatly hinders creativity and would encourage players interested in making builds to look at mods that allow full respeccing.

The Mechanics of Build Design

So now we've discussed the overall theory behind build design, this is where a lot of builds really start to fall down. If you want to make a build good, or a good build great, I'm sorry to say that there is no magic secret that is going to help you avoid maths. However it isn't all doom and gloom for those of you who detest maths because with the power of computers you can make your life a lot easier.

Here are some numbers and graphs for my upcoming Engineer guide. I know it probably looks like a lot but its a lot simpler than it looks.

The first chart shows how Emberquake Scales with Strength assuming two key things. Firstly that I am using the max rank of Emberquake and secondly that I am using Arcgap's Vice[tidbi.ru]. This mace is by far the best mace for an Emberquake Engineer because it does purely elemental damage, meaning that 100% of its damage is scaled by focus. Under these two assumptions and all of the mechanics I've detailed above I then ran calculations for how much damage Emberquake would do if I had varying amounts of strength. I then repeated the process with Focus.

Finally I repeated the process again this time with equal amounts of Strength and Focus. The results pretty clearly speak for themselves. However it was only because I did this that I was able to confidently say that, for example strength was even worth using. I can also now say, with certainty, that equal amounts of strength and focus will give you higher damage returns than pure Strength or Focus alone. However, this does assume that Strength scales CHD and this does not have infinite returns. Once you have reached the CHD cap, pure focus is a better return for your investment than a mix of points.

Simply doing this however, which really didn't take that long, I now know what I need to be looking for in gear, and how I need to be itemising to increase the damage of Emberquake.

The exact same thing applies to defence. If you need a certain amount of block rate, for example, you look at the options available to increase your block rate and then look at how much each of those options is going to have an impact on your itemisation budget.

The Two Most Overpowered Items in the Game

So having said all I've said, there are two items I need to mention, in vanilla TL2, that to my mind, are ludicrously OP. To the point where they should be included in every build, at all, ever. I can almost never find a reason to not include these items in a build, They are The Asphyx[tidbi.ru] and the Hands of Orlac[tidbi.ru]. Firstly what do they do?

The Asphyx

12.8 Health loss per second!

26 Mana stolen on hit

Hands of Orlac

12.8 Health loss per second!

135 Health stolen on hit

Set Bonus

2 Pieces: 12.8 Health loss per second!

2 Pieces: Charge rate increased by 30%

Now I know what you're thinking? "How is that good? It makes me lose 38 HP/s and all I get is 26 Mana per hit and 135 HP per hit. Well yes initially it may look bad. However they also have 5 Sockets...each. Let me first introduce you to my little friend the Skull of X`n!troph[tidbi.ru].

Skull of X`n!troph

Weapon: -404 to All Armor per hit

Armor/Trinket: 103 Health recovery per second

Yes that's right, you put one of these in one of those 10 sockets, not only are you now gaining 65HP/s but you still have 9 Sockets left. That's 5 Sockets more than any other piece of gear would normally let you have. The remaining two gems that make this just so silly are the Lovantine Skull[tidbi.ru] and the Wfuntir Skull[tidbi.ru].

Lovantine Skull

Weapon: -89 to All Armor per hit

Armor/Trinket: +40 Strength Attribute bonus

Wfuntir Skull

20% chance to Poison for 5 sec.

Armor/Trinket: +62 Focus Attribute bonus

With these 2 skulls you can either have 200 Strength or a whopping 310 Focus from the 5 additional sockets alone. From what I've seen there just aren't glove/helm combos that can outdo this sheer amount of stats and so these two items are in my mind, OP.

Reason's not to use them: you consider it cheesy/anti-fun and/or they look atrocious. If you don't want to use them in your build I won't judge and if you have a geniune mathematical reason not to, all the better, as I really dislike how universally powerful they are, but, at the end of the day, if you're after power, these are what you go for.

References

These are the references I used to gather this information, sadly some of them are defunt.

The Old Torchlight 2 Runic Forums, with particular mention to Armis' Embermage Handbook.

"The Deth Guild" who have an excellent enchantment guide:

http://www.dethguild.com/torchlight/torchlight-ii-enchanting-guide/

A great resource for all things Torchlight, Tidbi.ru

https://tidbi.ru/tindex.html

The GUTS Editor

Steam User ADEC Inc who Helped with the enchanting formulae. Discussion is contained within the comments section of this guide.

Political Science Went Public. American Democracy Got Worse.

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Political Science Went Public. American Democracy Got Worse.

Julia Azari

8 - 10 minutes

Public-facing political science is a civic enterprise. We don’t all do this for the perks of having less time for research and receiving hate-mail. The project, at its core, is about communicating social science findings to better inform the media and the public. This blog, specifically, began as a way to counterbalance the common assumption that political parties are bad, hoping instead to highlight how parties are essential and even good for democracy.

No doubt many of us still feel committed to this part of the public scholarship mission. During the last six years or so, it has felt especially crucial, and public-facing work has proliferated, even as the space has changed. More importantly, though, the task has changed. Initially, it seemed like sharing knowledge on its own would be a contribution to the health of democracy. And maybe it has been – I like to think that, at the margins, we have made things a bit better by informing the conversation. But the fact remains: threats to American democracy have grown while we’ve been building up the public-facing aspect of our discipline.

In some ways this has been a big moment for interaction across subfields, as American politics scholars have suddenly grown very interested in the findings of their comparative colleagues. The latter group has generously shared its collective knowledge about the health and survival of democracies and how to conceptualize, assess, and respond to threats posed by anti-democratic actors and movements. A bit more slowly, the mainstream American politics field also began paying more attention to scholars of race and American political development who have been focused on these issues for many years in our own backyard.

But the moment has nonetheless posed real challenges for many of us trained in the American politics tradition. I want to reflect here on three dilemmas in the study of American politics that are relevant for the twenty-first century crisis of democracy and that seem, to me at least, to defy straightforward answers for scholars.

Polarization is destructive. The alternative may be worse.

The idea that polarization is a problem to be solved still motivates a great deal of the civic space where political scientists are involved. This approach offers goals that are straightforward, if difficult to achieve: talking to people you disagree with. Figuring out how Republicans and Democrats can work together to achieve policies they can agree on. Reducing extremism.

Over time, others have raised objections to this conceptualization. One is the asymmetric nature of polarization: once we had evidence that the two sides had different attitudes about compromise and ideology, it was hard to treat polarization, intellectually, as a single problem. The difference between the two party coalitions is not just in their ideas but also their composition: that one party is far more diverse racially and religiously is a significant factor for thinking about how polarization works.

In practical terms, this leaves a lot of questions about moderation and compromise as ideals. As historian Thomas Zimmer has put it, polarization can also be understood as the result of progress on race and gender issues. Viewed in that light, it doesn’t seem like something to shy away from, or a problem by itself.

Where this gets challenging is that many of the critiques of how polarization functions, especially when combined with US political institutions, are valid. Intractable divisions and hostile feelings between members of different parties does appear to undermine democracy. It’s not really clear what political scientists should recommend, or even what theoretical framework is most fruitful for us to study.

“Leadership” is cheesy and imprecise and also really important.

Studying the presidency in modern political science has long been tricky. The “small-n” problem has guided scholars to topics that can more easily be studied at a larger scale: Congressional roll call votes, mass voting behavior, or features of the executive branch that fit these parameters (executive orders, for example). These are all good subjects of study and I’m glad this work exists. But presidential administrations, as few as there have been, are still worthwhile subjects of study. There’s excellent work in this area. But it still carries a bit of a stigma under the prevailing methodological ideas.

It's not just about degrees of freedom. When you get deeply into the questions about studying individual presidents and administrations, values, leadership, and styles/approaches become really important. And it can be difficult to talk about that in a social science context without someone bringing up the long-criticized work by James Barber (breaking American presidents into psychological types). Just because typologies can fall into pseudoscientific traps, and concepts like leadership are difficult to define doesn’t mean these things aren’t important.

The Trump years illustrated why these factors matter, to the point of it being cliché and almost not worth mentioning. The quality of the decision-making process, the ability to exercise restraint and judgment, the capacity for follow-through – these are all factors that are difficult to quantify and yet shaped the most important moments of the Trump years. While Trump is the starkest example, there are numerous examples of this from other administrations – recent and historical – that are difficult to otherwise explain. Yet, like with polarization, we seem to struggle with a framework, in this case to incorporate these concepts into a vision of rigorous social science.

Institutions are essential to democracy. And also an obstacle to it.

I touched on this problem in my piece after January 6, 2021, and it seems worth revisiting now. Institutions became a political science buzzword after the 2016 election – would Trump destroy them? Would they hold? Would they constrain the president?

These questions turned out to defy easy answers, and the later years of Trump’s presidency highlighted other problems with institutions: activists and commentators questioned the nature of policing, as well as the structure of the Electoral College, and the Senate. In the U.S. context, institutions have as often as not embodied racist compromises or worse. Our clunky apparatus for choosing a president is out of sync with contemporary expectations about what democracy means.

Democracy requires stable institutions, but many of our institutions need revisiting. This same logic applies to norms, which can preserve democracy or be an impediment to it.

Questions about the Supreme Court illustrate some of the problems with “preserving institutions” as an objective. Comparativists warned us about judicial independence, and while the Courts were generally unconvinced by some of Trump’s most autocratic impulses (especially after the 2020 election), the Supreme Court has essentially become a wing of the conservative legal movement, enacting unpopular decisions without much institutional check. In other words, it’s not exactly clear whether this fits the definition of an independent judiciary or one that’s been coopted by an autocratic political movement. And if the latter is true, then what? When do we know that an institution has become so toxic, or corrupt, or anti-democratic, that preserving it can no longer be a viable goal? With dissatisfaction with the court as an institution growing and no clear institutional checks in sight, this is not an abstract question.

At the intersection of some of these problems are other tendencies that I see public political science fall into that may not be achieving our intended results. One example is the dismissive attitude toward reform movements and broad political dissatisfaction. While I admit that questions about term limits and third parties have occasionally had me feign an interest in sports in order to get away, the fact remains that political scientists have been good at explaining to ourselves why these aren’t real solutions to our problems. We’ve been less successful at taking these perennial favorites as starting points for what Americans think is wrong with the country. We’ve spent the last decade trying to explain the findings of our field. Maybe we should spend the next one finding new questions to answer.

Political parties in Congress: a ten-year retrospective

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Political parties in Congress: a ten-year retrospective

Matthew Green

4 - 5 minutes

Since the Mischiefs of Faction blog started ten years ago, the platforms, leadership, and strategies of political parties in Congress have changed in many important ways. A few changes in particular are worth noting – not only for their impact on how Congress functions, but also as a reminder that our four congressional parties (House and Senate Democrats, House and Senate Republicans) do not always follow the same developmental path.

1. Greater diversity. Congressional parties have become more diverse over the past decade. Both parties in both chambers have more women members than ever before. A growing number of lawmakers are non-Christian or do not identify with a particular denomination.

This diversity is not distributed equally between the parties; far more Republicans than Democrats are Christian men, for example. But overall, such increase in descriptive representation brings Congress closer to being an “exact portrait of the people at large,” the ideal touted by John Adams. Political science research has also shown that diversity in Congress has an impact on everything from voting to constituent advocacy.

2. More polarized voting. Perhaps the most widely noted trend in congressional party politics over the past decade is an increase in voting polarization. For instance, the average party unity score of lawmakers -- measured as the average frequency with which a lawmaker casts their ballot with their party on a vote which pits a majority of one party against a majority of the other – have increased to near-record highs.

But not every party has polarized equally. As has long been the case, members of the minority show less unity, in part because the governing party can use its agenda control to bring up measures that divide the minority. And in the Senate, where such agenda control is weaker, one sees less polarization. It is a reminder that voting behavior is driven not only by policy differences but also by institutional differences.

3. More internal divisions. Paradoxically, this increased voting unity since 2012 belied another, arguably more important development: the rise of assertive party factions willing to hold their own party’s agenda hostage to get their way. The most obvious example has been the House Freedom Caucus, which was created in 2015 and became a major player in both the House and in the Trump presidency. In the current Congress, House Democrats struggled at times with the Progressive Caucus, a much larger group that has used its size to try forcing changes to the party’s agenda.

Such factions are less important in the Senate. As Ruth Bloch Rubin has observed, the chamber is less friendly territory for intraparty organizations. But individual senators can cause problems for their party, and the extremely narrow margin in the Senate over the past two years has given lawmakers like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) outsized influence.

4. Stability in leadership. A final striking development over the past decade is the lack of turnover in congressional party leadership. Nancy Pelosi remains the House Democrats’ top leader and Steny Hoyer is their number two (and have held those positions for nearly two decades.) In the Senate, Mitch McConnell is still the leader of Republicans, and while Democrats have a new leader (Chuck Schumer, who replaced Harry Reid in 2017), Dick Durbin has been Democratic Whip since 2005.

This lack of leadership change has been criticized for, among other things, driving out ambitious young lawmakers who have no way to climb the leadership ladder. But it can also be credited for ensuring the parties have had experienced leaders at the helm during difficult times (like the Trump presidency).

The important exception to this trend is House Republicans, who have been through two Speakers (John Boehner and Paul Ryan), two minority/majority leaders (Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy), and two whips (McCarthy and Steve Scalise). This is partly a consequence of the party’s internal divisions, which have made governing difficult. And should Republicans win control of the House in November, the lack of an experienced leader at the party’s helm could come back to haunt them.

Democratic backsliding is happening. Good thing we already know what to do.

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Democratic backsliding is happening. Good thing we already know what to do.

Jennifer N. Victor

9 - 11 minutes

Our ancestors taught us how to defeat autocracy in the U.S.; we should heed them.

people gathered in protest holding signs that say "We presist + resist" and "Demand Justice"

Protesters outside Mitch McConnell's Capitol Hill home on the evening the Senate confirms Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, February 9, 2017. Photo credit: Lorie Shaull

It's tempting to start a 10-year retrospective on political blogging with a grandiose statement about just how much has changed over the past decade. When we started this blog in 2012, we mostly wrote explanatory pieces about “regular order” party politics, but today we are more likely to offer commentary about existential questions of democracy. To fully appreciate that shift, we need to look further back than one decade.

In the U.S., and elsewhere, representative democracies are collapsing. The writers at Mischiefs of Faction definitely did not expect this outcome when we started in 2012. The consequences of democratic decline are collectively dreadful, but there are good reasons not to despair. We've seen this story before and our forbearers taught us how to deal with it. In one word: organize.

Representative democracy is in decline

The rate of social decay today is increasing at an alarming pace. There are legitimate reasons to believe governments and economies are unstable, and the signals come from a variety of sources. When Bright Line Watch surveyed Americans in the fall of 2021, a full year after the 2020 election, only 27 percent of Republicans were “very” or “somewhat confident” that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election. Election denial is actively eroding common faith in elections—the hallmark of democracy.

A recent study by Pew Research showed vast majorities of partisans hold very negative sentiments about “the other party.” Specifically, 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats say that members of the other party are more immoral and dishonest than other Americans. Negative partisanship has metastasized.

Even basic civil liberties are under duress. According to a recent report from NBC, over two dozen states have banned books in the past nine months. These bans are evidence of a conservative backlash against recent advances in civil rights for LGBTQ people and against calls for a more holistic understanding of US history that is not white-centered.

To add to this angst, the entire population has just lived through a global pandemic, in which over 1 million American lives were lost; the 7th most deadly plague to afflict humans in modern history. Covid-19 was the third leading cause of death among Americans in 2021, according to the CDC. Research has suggested that hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided if the federal government's response had been more coordinated and aggressive.

Among scholars who have examined anti-democratic shifts in political parties, there has been an increasing focus on rightward extremism and growing factions in the Republican party toward illiberalism. According to the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, US parties have shifted little on the traditional liberal-conservative ideological scale, but Republicans have become increasingly drawn toward illiberal viewpoints, such as violating minority rights, disrespecting opponents, and encouraging violence. The most observant writers of our time are wondering out loud about how democracy persists in a nation where one major party does not value democratic principles.

The U.S. is in a precarious position today. But, looking at the ascendent illiberalism and autocratic demagoguery in other parts of the world (Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, Italy, India, and elsewhere), the U.S. is not particularly unique. It is useful, however, to use a comparative and historical lens to view the current context of American politics.

We've been here before

America’s situation may feel novel because more people than ever are experiencing the uncertainty of failing democracy for the first time, but part of the reason for that is that more people than ever before have experienced democracy over the last few generations. US democracy reached its peak in the period between 1965 and 2013, when federal protections for voting rights were at their most expansive. For most U.S. adults today who lived through that peak period, our reference points of democratic efficacy are very high. Any backsliding, of course, represents a loss of democratic liberalism, but life is not static and the arc of history tells us we should expect backsliding to follow periods of progress.

After the U.S. Civil War and the period of federally enforced Reconstruction that expanded rights for many African Americans, we entered a long harsh period of backsliding—the Jim Crow era. Between 1877 and 1965, democratic backsliding was concentrated in the American South. This era included vigilantism, lynchings, violence, state-supported racial segregation, and loss of rights and liberties for millions of Americans, whose progeny were subsequently locked out of economic and educational opportunities to build wealth, own property, and advance their family wellbeing, relative to many white Americans.

This period of backsliding is instructive for managing our current backsliding for two reasons. First, we’ve been here before. We should not act as if America has been a beacon of exemplary democracy for hundreds of years and does not know how to manage domestic conflict; rather, we’ve only been a democracy for fewer than 60 years, and our entire history is a cycle of managing domestic conflict. The U.S. experienced autocratic rule, at least regionally, for the better part of a century through the Jim Crow era—it is not a novel invention in modern America.

Second, the lesson of prior periods of backsliding is that organizing against oppression and autocracy is the way out. In fact, it is the only way out. Jim Crow did not magically end in the 1960s because Americans finally came to their moral senses. For all his tremendous accomplishments, Martin Luther King, Jr. did not single-handedly cause progress on racial equality. He wasn't even popular at the time; he was a strongly controversial figure. The entire period of Jim Crow is filled with activism, organization, coalition building, and advocacy to improve institutions and create a just society for more people. A robust Civil Rights movement existed in the late 1800s and early 1900s led by prolific and courageous leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells.

We’ve been here before and our ancestors have shown us the way out. Do not relent. Persist. Seek justice. Organize. Be generous toward your community. Express gratitude toward others and yourself. When you can muster the courage, call out injustice when you see it.

This empowerment is the main reason not to despair for too long, given the state of things. Look for signs of organizing, resistance, and community-building around you—you will find them. But the other reason is that 10 years is an insufficient lens to understand the transitions of the past decade. If we use a longer telescope into history, we can appreciate the magnitude of improvement to the human condition, despite the recent backsliding in democratic liberalism.

Things could be—and have been—much worse

“200 years ago, everyone in the world lacked democratic rights, and now billions of people have them.” Today, there are more democratic than non-democratic countries on Earth.

There are fewer deaths from communicable diseases, maternity, and nutritional diseases today than at any time in history. In 1990, 46 percent of global deaths were from these preventable causes and in 2019, they were 26 percent of deaths—a remarkable human advancement.

Fewer people on Earth die of famine today than at any point in human history.

Fewer people on Earth live in extreme poverty today than at any point in human history. As economic growth and wealth have improved across the globe in the past century, there are more humans who say they are happy and satisfied than at any other time in history.

It may feel like cheating to dig back fifty, 100, or 200 years ago to contextualize contemporary politics—after all this is supposed to be a 10-year retrospective—but the longer arc of human progress provides an important perspective for our current moment. Things are bleak, but they could be—and have been—a whole lot worse.

There is no certainty that America will stop its backsliding. The last period of intense backsliding lasted nearly a century. Evidence suggests things are likely to get worse in the near term, before they get better, and who knows if things will turn around during our lifetimes. While the prospect of more political violence and democratic backsliding is dire, appreciating that we know what we need to do to right the ship, and we aren’t the first ones to try, is, at least for me, a motivating force to do the work democracy requires.

Here's to another decade of Mischiefs.